Walmart is expanding its money transfer service, and the first two options available both work with Ripple.
Walmart, a retail behemoth in America, unveiled its plans to provide more options when it comes to its money transfer services. With this, they have continued their partnership with Ria and MoneyGram, two partners of Ripple. This new expansion in Walmart’s money transfer services will give their customers who are using their Walmart2World payment service the choice to choose which provider they want when sending money and payments, or international transfer.
Both Ria and MoneyGram work with Ripple, and it uses Ripple’s services for their cross-border payments. MoneyGram, in particular, uses XRP for some of its payments and transactions made between Mexico and the US. A statement from Walmart says that the expanded services will be accessible to customers from 4,700 US stores they have in the coming weeks.
According to Walmart US vice president of financial services, Wilbert Noronha, the goal behind their launch of Walmart2Walmart and Walmart2World was to build a platform that provides money transfer terminals that allow customers with more choices when it comes to transferring money to family and friends wherever they are in the world.
According to Walmart, this upcoming expanded service will offer its customers more convenience when it comes to payout methods with more and more payout locations and better foreign exchange rates.
Ria and MoneyGram are two significant Ripple partners. Digital payment services of both partners are powered by the xCurrent and xRapid remittance services, which leverages on XRP.
Back in May, Ria and Ripple teamed up with plans to enable blockchain-powered instant global payments. The integration aims to provide users with better visibility, end-to-end tracking, and estimated delivery time.
One month after teaming up with Ria, Ripple also went for MoneyGram, acquiring a $50 million stake. Now, MoneyGram uses part of the blockchain-based services from Ripple, xRapid, for some of its international payments using XRP.
Since 2014 when it launched its money transfer platforms, Walmart claims to about $1 billion of estimated cost savings.
